A Masterpiece and Some Christmas Books

IN 1906 Houghton Mifflin published all of Thoreau then known to exist—the books, the journals and the letters. The sixteen volumes were so well designed that only some of the Powell and King reports in the United States Geological Survey, from the Government Printing Office, can rival them for beauty. For each volume there are five photographs, reproduced by lithography, of such clarity and precision that Thoreau’s preternaturally sharp eyes and taste for detail could not have advised the photographer better if the two had worked side by side. The photographer was Herbert Gleason, a forgotten genius who ought to rank high among American artists but is unknown to every reference work in the republic. Gleason’s pictures are the sharpest critical appreciation of Thoreau other than Charles Ives’ perception that Thoreau is the greatest American composer. By a similar transposition of values Thoreau can be claimed as one of America’s finest visual artists. Many photographers have tried their hands at Thoreau since Gleason but none has achieved anything comparable and their efforts are faded by the brilliance of the prose they are meant to illustrate.

But now, a century after Thoreau and a half-century after Herbert Gleason, Eliot Porter, the physician and chemist turned photographer of birds, insects and forest animals, has matched his genius with that of Thoreau and made a book of such beauty that we wonder, upon being able to put it down, if we’ve ever seen a photograph, or the world, before. In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World (the title is from the essay “Walking”) cannot be categorized: it is so distinguished among books of photography, among anthologies, among art books, that its transcendence is superlative. It is a work of art and only incidentally a book. Here Thoreau’s unrivalled eye and comprehension of nature join photography in the hands of a master, and the two together harmonize so perfectly that it is with a chill that we realize the two collaborators are a hundred years apart in time.

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Guy Davenport

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IN 1906 Houghton Mifflin published all of Thoreau then known to exist—the books, the journals and the letters. The sixteen volumes were so well designed that only some of the Powell and King reports in the United States Geological Survey, from the Government Printing Office, can rival them for beauty. For each volume there are five photographs, reproduced by lithography, of such clarity and precision that Thoreau’s preternaturally sharp eyes and taste for detail could not have advised the photographer better if the two had worked side by side. The photographer was Herbert Gleason, a forgotten genius who ought to rank high among American artists but is unknown to every reference work in the republic. Gleason’s pictures are the sharpest critical appreciation of Thoreau other than Charles Ives’ perception that Thoreau is the greatest American composer. By a similar transposition of values Thoreau can be claimed as one of America’s finest visual artists. Many photographers have tried their hands at Thoreau since Gleason but none has achieved anything comparable and their efforts are faded by the brilliance of the prose they are meant to illustrate.

But now, a century after Thoreau and a half-century after Herbert Gleason, Eliot Porter, the physician and chemist turned photographer of birds, insects and forest animals, has matched his genius with that of Thoreau and made a book of such beauty that we wonder, upon being able to put it down, if we’ve ever seen a photograph, or the world, before. In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World (the title is from the essay “Walking”) cannot be categorized: it is so distinguished among books of photography, among anthologies, among art books, that its transcendence is superlative. It is a work of art and only incidentally a book. Here Thoreau’s unrivalled eye and comprehension of nature join photography in the hands of a master, and the two together harmonize so perfectly that it is with a chill that we realize the two collaborators are a hundred years apart in time.